Review: Looper’s Time-Traveling Hitmen Kill Boredom Dead

In Looper, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis play younger and older versions of a time-traveling assassin.Photo: Alan Markfield/Sony Pictures

Here’s the problem with most time-travel movies: They’re about time travel. Or they get trapped in the paradoxes time travel presents (e.g., if you make out with your mom in the past you may never be born). Not that subverting the space-time continuum and hop-skipping all over the past and future isn’t cool — it’s totally cool — but so many time-travel stories have been told that it’s hard to make a new one.

Luckily, Looper is not a time-travel movie. Instead, director Rian Johnson, who also wrote the script, smartly uses the invention of time travel as the jumping-off point for a compelling tale, rather than making it the tale itself. Even when he does stumble on a time-travel trope or two, the scene serves the story instead of being distracting.

Looper is also one hell of a ride. The R-rated movie, which opens Friday, begins by getting to the point.

(Spoiler alert: Minor plot points follow.)

There are the moments where Looper truly excels at simultaneously being a sci-fi film, an action movie, and a thought-provoking drama.

The year is 2044 and time travel has been invented 30 years in the future — and almost immediately made illegal, which is to say criminals are the only ones using it. These future villains send anyone they want 86’ed back in time to be killed by assassins from the past known as “loopers.” As Joe the looper (played by the ever-evolving Joseph Gordon-Levitt) explains, they kill their marks and dispose of the bodies — or, “I do the necessaries, collect my silver.” (Each target is sent back with bricks of silver strapped to their backs.)

Loopers in Joe’s world live relatively sweet lives compared to the decrepit conditions around them. They possess money, women, some weird new hallucinogen that’s taken via eyedropper and cool vintage cars (Joe’s baby is a Miata, LOL). Their nights are full of partying until the day they “close their loop” and their future self is sent back for them to kill, with bricks of gold on their backs. Then most of them just party nonstop. They’re rich, in possession of the knowledge of when and how they’ll die, and have nothing to kill but time.

That is unless they can’t pull the trigger on themselves. When Joe’s friend Seth — a telekinetic mutant, or TK — comes to his apartment one night scared to death after just such a blunder, he tells Joe that his future self informed him that a new crime boss has been going around closing all the loops in sight. At first Joe hides Seth in his stash room, but eventually gives him up after being called before their boss Abe (a comically maniacal Jeff Daniels, whose character has come from the future to run the operation). What happens next is a gruesome, yet awesome, twist on Marty McFly’s disappearing hand from Back to the Future.

In moments like this, Looper truly excels at pulling off the hat trick of simultaneously being a sci-fi film, an action movie and a thought-provoking drama. It doesn’t get mired down in how time travel works — there is no souped-up DeLorean, no TARDIS. In fact, the actual time-travel mechanism is seen only once and the technology isn’t explained. (In Johnson’s world, moviegoers are big enough nerds to just accept time travel and move on.)

The movie’s future doesn’t look too futuristic or too dystopian: The hoverbikes don’t work that well and the beautiful cellphones still can’t get signals out in farm country. In other words, it feels like the real world, just in 30-some years.

With Looper, director Rian Johnson (right) has made a great sci-fi film where the plot takes center stage. Photo: Alan Markfield/Sony Pictures

Eventually it comes time for Joe to close his own loop, but future-Joe (played by Bruce Willis, who got to keep his face and voice while Gordon-Levitt got makeup and some vocal help to look and sound like Mr. Die Hard) outsmarts his past self.

The ensuing struggle between young Joe’s mission to keep his present intact (by essentially killing his future self) and old Joe’s attempts to fix the future (by not dying) carries the film through the remaining two acts. And while much of the story centers on the effects of time travel on the people involved, the characters themselves remain the movie’s primary focus. Johnson wisely avoids getting bogged down in trying to explain away the inherent paradoxes of time travel and multiple realities — that’s just the backdrop. The director makes you care about the moral quandaries of the Joes, not whether they’re allowed to exist in the same space and time.

If this makes it sound like there will be a predictable outcome, there isn’t. As old Joe notes to his younger self, every time he changes something in his past his “memories aren’t my memories anymore” and everything becomes “just one eventuality.” What Johnson has created is a plot so intricate that every time a new event transpires, it seems as though a new conclusion is imminent. It’s the kind of mind-trickery that made Inception so fascinating, but it’s kept simple enough that Looper can be enjoyed as a simple action movie. (Nice trick, that.)

This is Johnson’s greatest achievement with Looper — making a sci-fi film for action fans, a drama for futuristic-fetish geeks, and a gangster movie for … well, pretty much anyone. Yes, there are some holes in the time-travel theory, but those can be easily left to the nitpickers.

What’s most important is that Johnson — still a young director at 38 — is moving this particular segment of sci-fi forward. Zal Batmanglij did something similar with Sound of My Voice, but time travel was possibly just the musing of a psychotic cult leader in that film.

Sci-fi needs more movies like Looper in which, finally, someone has closed the loop on the time-travel conventions of old. What does the future hold, Mr. Johnson?